Weapons of Mass Deception

If ever anyone tries to tell you that headlines don't matter, just recite this story.

According to a new Harris poll, fully half of Americans still believe that Saddam had WMD's when we invaded three years ago.

Says the Washington Post:

The reality in this case is that after a 16-month, $900-million-plus investigation, the U.S. weapons hunters known as the Iraq Survey Group declared that Iraq had dismantled its chemical, biological and nuclear arms programs in 1991 under U.N. oversight. That finding in 2004 reaffirmed the work of U.N. inspectors who in 2002-03 found no trace of banned arsenals in Iraq.

But no matter. Thanks to a heavy propaganda machine, which has been running since well before the invasion, the public (or at least half the public), bought the story hook, line, and sinker.

Which means that to 50 percent of the public, the question "Why are we in Iraq?" has already been answered, while the other half is still wondering when its counterpart is going to wake the fuck up.

The Post story continues:

Timing may explain some of the poll result. Two weeks before the survey, two Republican lawmakers, Pennsylvania's Sen. Rick Santorum and Michigan's Rep. Peter Hoekstra, released an intelligence report in Washington saying 500 chemical munitions had been collected in Iraq since the 2003 invasion...

But the Pentagon and outside experts stressed that these abandoned shells, many found in ones and twos, were 15 years old or more, their chemical contents were degraded, and they were unusable as artillery ordnance. Since the 1990s, such "orphan" munitions, from among 160,000 made by Iraq and destroyed, have turned up on old battlefields and elsewhere in Iraq, ex-inspectors say. In other words, this was no surprise.

"These are not stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction," said Scott Ritter, the ex-Marine who was a U.N. inspector in the 1990s. "They weren't deliberately withheld from inspectors by the Iraqis."

I'm sure Bush is grateful, Santorum, you slug.

I wonder what would happen if the public actually had an idea of how they were lied to, and for what end...